Last week I bought a lens off eBay for the first time, and it arrived yesterday (sooner than I expected, which is just the kind of surprise I like). It's a "double-X" Minolta Maxxum 50mm 1.7 lens, which -- if I can believe what I read on multiple sites prior to bidding -- means it's a model from early in the production run for this lens, and may have better optics than later-produced units.

Anyway, the point of buying this is to hopefully improve the quality of photos I'm taking for microstock sites. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the cheap "kit" lenses that were bundled with my Maxxum 7, and which I'm now using on my Sony Alpha A-100, were providing sub-par results. I've been throwing away far too many exposures and uploading far too few to the microstock sites that sell my photos for me.

So, if things go as I hope, my results will be better and I'll be able to upload more photos. Keeping my fingers crossed...